Fade, Then Burn
by blkat140795
Summary: Matching tattoos, received at age 16, mark true soul mates. Carmilla's mark faded three hundred years ago.


_Disclaimer: I own basically nothing below except the order the words are written in._

_This one is for Christina. Hope you like it._

Carmilla had given up looking for love when she turned sixteen. That was the year everyone received their soul tattoo, a mark somewhere on the body that was copied exactly onto the body of the one person in the world you were destined to be with. Your soulmate.

By the time my mark appeared though, it was too late. The tattoo was barely a shadow on her pale skin, already faded almost into nonexistence. Marks only faded when the other person was dead, though they remained forever as a testament to the lost love. That was the last time I cried in almost two hundred years.

It was that despair that led to my Turning, I guess. After that day I was never careful or guarded enough. There was no point. I would never find that one person I belonged to, and who belonged to me. I would never bear my mark proudly on my wedding day as proof that the groom and I were destined for each other. I would never find love. It didn't matter. When mother pulled my out during the ball, I thought it would kill me. I didn't even fight back.

Ell's mark had been faded too. Sitting up late into the night in her room, she would wail into my arms that he had died in the war. I forget which one, they all blur together. I was such a good friend to her. It was my job. But something changed, and eventually it wasn't just because I had to. I wanted to. The number of nights she would cry over _him _lessened, but the number of nights we would stay up late talking increased. I even showed her my own faded mark once. It was a deeply personal thing, on I never would have showed her if she'd still had a mate. Honestly, she still shouldn't have let me show her. But she did, gently tracing the light pattern that remained.

When she asked me if it was possible to move on, I took my chances. I said yes. That I already had, with her. It paid off, if only for a little while.

After that, I was resigned to my fate. This is what happened to those who were unmarked or who lost their mark. We had missed out chance, and it was our lot to be alone. It was what we deserved. Everyone else in world belonged to someone else. There was no way to reclaim that chance for ourselves. I was so wrapped up in the misery and self-hate that I didn't even realize when my mark started to fill back in.

I hated Danny. I hated how she treated Laura, I hated how superior she thought she was, I hated how she breathed, I hated everything about her. Why this little bunny rabbit Laura thought that going out with the steamroller was a good idea, I would never understand. I was not jealous. I had given that up a long time ago. I just didn't like Danny being in the room I was being forced to share. So I was cruel. I asked Laura if their marks matched. Cutie wouldn't answer, just smiled at me and told me it was none of my business.

I hated Danny.

Laura was too much like _her_. Ell had broken through my walls by being fragile and soft spoken, but always kind. Laura was almost the opposite. She was feisty and sarcastic, determined enough to fight the whole world to protect someone she cared about. Conversely, her feistiness only made me want to protect her more. When LaFontaine was taken, I could almost see her precious heart break, and it made me wish I really had died that night in the ballroom. Then I never would have caused her this much pain. They all looked to me to fix it, since I had unwittingly been the cause.

No. That's not true. I had known what I was doing, I just hadn't known it would lead me to _her_.

Eventually I convinced her to sleep. She was frantic to find LaFontaine, but she was also exhausted. After arguing perversely with me for about ten minutes, she finally sunk onto her bed in a dead sleep. I was about to follow her when I noticed her jeans had ridden up, bearing a tattoo wrapped around her ankle. A very familiar tattoo.

A dark, Celtic pattern of intertwined bars curling around Laura's ankle. Slowly I pulled the jeans up around my own leg, where I saw an identical pattern, in the identical place. Lines that had been fuzzy for centuries were suddenly clear, bars that had been grey since 1696 were suddenly darker than night.

I looked up when I heard Laura gasp. She'd seen our marks. Identical, down to the last detail.

I'd heard kissing your one was like fireworks, but I still wasn't prepared for it. It was like everything around us had suddenly caught on fire, but neither of us cared. The fire burned away everything: the despair, the long years, Ell, Mother, guilt. None of it mattered. Nothing but Laura. So I just stayed there and let everything around us burn.


End file.
